← Back to context

Comment by duncanawoods

9 years ago

Great features, thanks!

The one feature I can't believe I lived without that the HN Enhancement Suite chrome extension provides, is highlighting unread comments since your last visit. It actually makes it worthwhile revisiting e.g. a 200 comment thread when there are now 300 comments without just reading all the same comments again and being unable to spot the new ones.

If it became supported cross device by HN itself I would be very grateful.

Yes. Another user has argued for this effectively and persuaded us to do some version of it.

  • Yay. I often find threads where I have an educated guess that there will valuable comments but the thread is very new, not many comments yet, ends up as yet another HN tab that I left open and then go through them all once or twice a week... Although maybe that's not a bad thing - that saves tons of time ;)

  • The simple hack I use in my own extension to provide that feature on reddit without Gold just simply logs the timestamp of every visit of the thread in a cookie, and then allows to select "new comments since visit X", and then just computes the comment time back into a timestamp, compares, highlights.

    If HN would provide the actual timestamp in ISO format, as reddit does it, we could've had that a lot simpler a lot earlier.